Ukraine

Here you'll find book recommendations to help you understand the history and heterogeneous culture of Ukraine, Europe's second-largest country.

Yale historian Marci Shore, during an interview in which she picked five of the best Ukraine books, explained that the name 'Ukraine' means 'borderlands', and that it would be wrong to understand the conflict with Russia to run along ethnic grounds: "There’s a sense that if these are Ukrainian speakers on the Maidan, then they must be Ukrainian. And if they’re Russian speakers, they’re really Russian. And if there’s a war going on, it must be the ethnic Russians versus the ethnic Ukrainians," she said. "In my opinion, this would be a deep misunderstanding." The territory that is now present-day Ukraine, she explained, contains multitudes: "Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, Yiddish and German languages, literatures, humors, cultures, joys and despairs [have] intermingled for hundreds of years."

Red Famine is Anne Applebaum’s prizewinning book about the Holodomor famine of 1932-3. Also recommended on Five Books is a biography of Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet leader after Stalin, who grew up in eastern Ukraine.

At the time of writing, discussion of Ukraine is dominated by the conflict with Russia. We asked Serhii Plokhy, an eminent Ukrainian historian at Harvard, to recommend five of the best books on Russia-Ukraine relations to help us understand the backdrop to the 2022 invasion. "The point is to finish unfinished business from 2014," he told us. "[Putin's] goal is either to make Ukraine pro-Russian or dismember it."

Serhiy Zhadan, the musician and writer, is one of our most commonly recommended Ukrainian authors; his book The Orphanage was published in 2017 and translated into English in 2021. In children's books, we recommend The Mitten by Jan Brett, which is based on a Ukrainian folk tale.

A collection of the speeches of President Volodymyr Zelensky, A Message From Ukraine was published in November 2022 to raise money for Ukraine.